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Pirate Bay bust hailed by recording execs as boon to artists and industry

Bit torrent pioneers vow to fight ruling

Pirate Bay logo.

Photograph by: Handout
, Files

VANCOUVER - Canadian recording artists and other digital rights holders will benefit from a Swedish court ruling that is seeing the founders of the file sharing web site Pirate Bay sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay a large fine for breaking copyright law, according to the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

“It takes out the number one source of global illegitimate file sharing,” said Richard Pfohl, general counsel for association. “Obviously some of that traffic will migrate to other sites, but I think other sites will start to think twice when they think they will be held criminally liable.”

CRIA was cheering a ruling in a case that has been closely watched by copyright experts and Internet users around the globe. The website, at www.thepiratebay.org, bills itself as the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker. BitTorrent is a file sharing protocol that allows downloads of digital content and while users could track everything from music to movies to video games and other content through The Private Bay site, it argued it didn’t contravene copyright because it doesn’t store the copyright material.

Pfohl said that with The Pirate Bay reporting in February of this year that it had 22 million simultaneous users and reports indicating it handles 50 per cent of all BitTorrent traffic on the Internet, the court decision will have considerable impact.

“It will have a direct impact on Canadian artists and rights holders,” he said. Pirate Bay is the largest site of its kind in the world.

“It’s responsible for a tremendous amount of the copyright infringement that goes on around the world; the digital theft of creative works.”

A Delft University of Technology study found that more than 50 per cent of random sampling of torrents was tracked by The Pirate Bay with 20 per cent of the total tracked only by The Pirate Bay.

The court sentenced Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Carl Lundstrom were sentenced to a year in jail, and The Pirate Bay to pay a penalty of 30 million Swedish kronor (about Cdn$4.3 million).

In a press conference held by the Swedish company, The Pirate Bay promised to appeal the ruling, which it described on its website as a “crazy verdict.”

Pfohl said the ruling points to the need for copyright reform in Canadian legislation but Michael Geist, Canada research chair of Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, said Canadian law already has provisions that would cover that case.

“It is essential to note there is little reason to believe that given the same kind of facts and evidence we might not have reached the same decision in Canada,” he said, “The Pirate Bay case may be a number of things but a clear call for Canadian copyright reform it isn’t.”

Geist said pointing to the Swedish case as evidence of a need for copyright reform in Canada is a kind of “bait and switch.”

“You bait someone with The Pirate Bay and switch it up with legislation that has nothing to do with The Pirate Bay,” he said.

Geist said the Swedish court decision amounts to a public relations coup for the recording industry but he said it is unlikely to put an end to peer file sharing, just as the industry’s successful battle with the file sharing service Napster didn’t stop other similar services.

“I think if we have learned anything over the past 10 years it is that attempts to sue peer-to-peer file sharing out of existence don’t work,” he said.

A Vancouver-based BitTorrent sharing site isoHunt has launched its own lawsuit against the recording industry. isoHunt, which runs a site by that name and two others, TorrentBox and Podtropolic that allows users to search BitTorrent files on the Internet to find movies, music and other content, petitioned the BC Supreme Court to confirm it is not infringing copyright.

The judge ordered the case to a full trial. isoHunt has been sued in the United States by the Motion Picture Association of America.

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